Google’s New Privacy Policy

Google’s New Privacy Policy

In January, Google announced that it was overhauling its more than 60 privacy policies and replacing them with one. As Alma Whitten, Google’s Director of Privacy in Product and Engineering, wrote in the announcement, the idea is to create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience across Google.

The search giant said the main change for users would be that it could combine information from one service with its other services, thus providing a more fluid user experience. For example, if you conduct several searches on Google on a particular item, Google could assume that you want a video on that item if you then visit YouTube. What do you think of Google’s new privacy policy? Does it affect you at all? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

According to Danny Sullivan, the Executive Editor of Search Engine Land, the new policy will provide users with more personalized results. He told us that it really wasn’t surprising that Google made the change since most other tech and Internet companies have one privacy policy for all their products and services.

Google, which kind of has come from privacy policies on a per product basis, is kind of playing catch up, so that they have the ability to be more flexible both in what they may do with the information and how they may use the information to improve products and services he said.

This flexibility is what has some people worried, however. Under the new policy, Google could potentially take the information it gathers when users search to target them with ads. Although Google says it will not do this, the new policy gives it the right if it so chooses.